Thread by @HickeyWriter

I've been following the rise of the far right for years, and I can tell you exactly who many of them are. They're people *exactly* like me. They're not poor, they're not uneducated.

The *most* dangerous people in the far right now are middle-class cis het men between twenty and fifty, highly educated, usually in good jobs, with tons of spare money, but no social skills.

People who have spare time but nothing to fill it with, who don't have many friends or a girlffriend and don't understand why because on paper they're a good catch.

There's a reason Trumpism started in three overlapping groups -- gamers, science fiction fans, and technolibertarian types -- not at football matches.

In particular, people who have always been the cleverest person in the room -- or who have always been *told* they're the cleverest person in the room, because cleverness is far more noticed among white men -- tend to be *extraordinarily* susceptible to conspiracism.

If you have got into the habit of thinking you know more than anyone else, and not checking your opinions with people around you (because there *are* no people around you, because you have few social skills) then "this is secret knowledge those idiots don't have" is catnip.

These people were generally in gifted programs at school, are generally autodidacts even if they also have a degree, and will have a *great* deal of knowledge on some specialist subject of theirs (often computer programming, but far from always).

But they'll also be Bitcoin fanatics (and Bitcoin is just the instantiation in code of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories), they'll be eugenicists, they'll believe that the world would be better if they were in charge because they're so much cleverer than those idiots.

I have, *multiple* times, got involved in very interesting-seeming online communities, full of people who share my interests and seem intelligent, only to pull back after a few months because "My God, it's full of fascism!"

But basically, the face of fascism today isn't (and probably never was) Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel. It's Dominic Cummings and Darren Grimes and people of their ilk.

And I'm far from immune to the thought processes that lead people there. I'm just lucky enough to have been exposed *very* early in life to books and documentaries about the Holocaust, to Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man, and to progressive ideas.

And since then I've gained enough marginalised friends that my *very* first thought when I see someone spouting fash shit is "Oh, that bastard wants to kill X" (where X is a friend in that marginalised group, who I don't want to see dead).

But yeah, anyway, the TL:DR is the people you want to be worried about are the clever, nerdy, white men into geek stuff, not anyone else.

if you want to understand these people, I recommend @ElSandifer's Neoreaction A Basilisk, the I Don't Speak German podcast, @davidgerard's Attack of the Fifty-Foot Blockchain, and my own comedy mystery novel about them, The Basilisk Murders.